SOURCE: "Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel" in Cultural Critique, Vol. 1, Fall, 1985, pp. 159-81.

In the following essay, McKeon analyzes the relationship between the instability of the novel as a genre and the growing instability of social categories during the eighteenth century.

Twenty-five years after its first appearance, Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel continues to be the most attractive model we have of how to conduct the study of this crucial literary phenomenon.¹ The phenomenon is crucial because it is modern. If the novel originated in early modern Europe, it should be possible to observe and describe its emergence within a historical context whose richness of detail has no parallel in earlier periods. But of course this is no coincidence: it is the rise of an unprecedented historical consciousness, and of its institutional affiliates, that has both encouraged the preservation of...